National Ballet of Canada. Choreography by Marco Goecke, Jerome Robbins and William Forsythe. Until June 1 at the Four Season Centre, 145 Queen St. W.; www.national.ballet.ca or 416-345-9595 or 1-866-345-9595.

There are moments in Marco Goecke’s Le Spectre de la Rose, presented here for the first time by the National Ballet on Wednesday night, when you wonder if your eyes are playing tricks.

The movement has the flickering character of an old silent movie. This has less to do with Udo Haberland’s often dingy lighting design than Goecke’s almost strongly punctuated, stroboscopic choreography.

Goecke fashioned his 20-minute work in 2009, on commission from Les Ballets de Monte Carlo, located in the gold-plated Mediterranean principality where its famous, Mikhail Fokine-choreographed predecessor of the same name received its premiere almost a century before.

That 1911 ballet, set to Carl Maria von Weber’s Invitation to the Dance, was a delicately perfumed romantic reverie, effectively a showcase for the extraordinary talent of the era’s dance superstar, Vaslav Nijinsky. Portraying the spirit of a rose, he soared through an open window to invade the dream of a young woman, slumbering in a chair after returning from her first ball, rose in hand. Although Nijinsky and his partner Tamara Karsavina had a duet, the big dancing went to the man.

In Goecke’s radical re-imagining, built out with extra Weber music and an ensemble of six red-suited men, the woman has an assertive presence and lots of dancing. The central man, clad by Michaela Springer in red-petaled leggings, seems less a figment of the woman’s dream than a tortured soul wishing he didn’t have to wear such a silly costume; silly only because Goecke has carried the ballet so far from the original’s pretext — slight as it ever was — that the petals seem superfluous.

Instead he’s given us an oddly contorted mating ritual, more insect-like than human, that only references its predecessor tangentially. The choreographic interest resides in Goecke’s extraordinary movement vocabulary, largely focused in angular, restless, constantly shifting arm movements, a 21st-century rejection of anything suggestive of romance or harmony.

The National Ballet’s dancers, versatile as ever, tackle this frenzied choreography with surging energy. In the male lead, Guillaume Côté delivers the sharp-edged movement with forceful clarity. Kathryn Hosier, in a stunning break-out from her regular anonymous place in the female corps, establishes an equally strong presence. Her long legs shimmer inside silky black pants that in the dim lighting sometimes make her pale costumed upper body look as if it’s hovering in space – all the while performing prodigies of articulation.

This fresh addition to the repertoire is just the start of a triple bill the National Ballet is marketing under the banner, “Physical Thinking.”

Choreography is by nature a physical expression and one hopes, although the evidence too often suggests otherwise, that a good deal of thought goes into it. Here, however, the description seems intended to signpost that dance doesn’t need stories to be enthralling. Abstraction, or semi-abstraction, can be equally compelling.

With revivals of two stylistic contrasting works, Jerome Robbins quarter-century old Opus 19/The Dreamer and William Forsythe’s 1991 the second detail to complement Goecke’s Spectre, the program is proof of that premise – a pure delight for those who value the metaphorical power of movement to stir both emotion and thought.

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